Orphan Openings: A Search for the Worst Pun

Looking back on the years she'd spent with Alastair, it was hard for Melanie to feel regret. At first the only basis for their relationship had been the similarity of their dietary restrictions; but with time, affection and opportunity, even a small similarity can be built into a substantial edifice in Aphrodite's honor. Even with her painful awareness of what had followed, Melanie could not help but see their love as having been a many-Splenda-ed thing.

Spartans on a Plane

And now, for your TGIF delectation: United 300.



Having recently seen 300, I have to say that this is just funny. Beverages, monitor -- you know the drill.

Book Review: The Death of a Pope

Out today from Ignatius Press is The Death of a Pope, a new novel by Piers Paul Read, a mainstream novelist (his survival novel Alive about a rugby team whose plane crashes in the Andes topped the New York Times bestseller list when it came out 25 years ago, and was later made into a film) who has also written both fiction and nonfiction on Catholic themes. He wrote a popular history of the templars a few years back, and On the Third Day, a thriller about the discovery in modern Israel of a crucified skeleton that some allege to be proof that Christ did not rise from the dead.

I had not read any of Read's previous books, but when Ignatius emailed me and offered me a review copy, the premise of the novel sounded interesting and I could not resist the lure of a free book. However, I did not initially expect much of it, my idea of modern "Catholic thrillers" having been formed by the likes of Pierced By A Sword, whose prose style treads that delicate line between incompetent and downright laughable.

However, I need not have feared. Read's prose is deft and indeed literary, though the modern device of using present tense narrative to convey immediacy is not necessarily my cup of tea. Those inclined to literary snobbery will not find themselves holding their noses as they read this novel by any stretch. The less pretentious reader will enjoy the fast-paced plot, which whisks him from a terrorist trial in London, to the refugee camps of Uganda, the chemistry labs of Cairo and at last to the 2005 papal conclave.

Juan Uriarte is an former Jesuit, who left the priesthood 20 years before in order to join the FMLN guerrilla army and fight the El Salvadoran government. Now he works for Misericordia International, a Catholic charitable organization which among its other work is helping to provide medical aide to refugees in Sudan and Uganda. We first meet him, however, in a British court, where he stands accused of having contacted members of the Basque ETA and the IRA with an eye to purchasing sarin nerve gas. The Crown alleges that he was doing this with an eye towards some terrorist attack. Uriarte claims that he never intended to use it against other humans, but rather against the horses and camels of the Sudanese militias who are slaughtering the refugees his organization is trying to help.

The ex-priest manages to escape conviction because the jury does not consider it beyond a reasonable doubt that he had terrorist intent, and so begins an increasingly fast paced search for the truth about Uriarte's intentions, as the Polish-English Mi5 agent who originally brought him in and a female reporter who finds herself attracted to Uriarte's passion for those suffering in the world both seek to understand what is really going on. Along the way we meet the reporter's uncle, a traditionalist English priest with friends in Rome; and a papabile Dutch cardinal whose one great fear is that his brief and unsuccessful pass at a fellow seminarian will be revealed to a media already ravening after the clergy abuse scandals that had rocked the US and Europe.

This is clearly an insider view of Catholicism, not the sort of outsider sensationalism so often found in movies and thrillers. Read's characters have the strengths and weaknesses of their types. Though I'd certainly take Read as being more on the traditional (or at least orthodox) side of the spectrum, his traditional Catholics are not saints, nor his progressive Catholics devils.

One of the things I found both interesting and realistic about the book is that while the thriller plot itself is brought to a close, and disaster averted, none of the characters actually have a fully accurate understanding of what's going on. They successfully uncover and thwart the plot despite some basic misunderstandings in their theories.

The Death of a Pope is an enjoyable and fast-paced read. If you're looking for a fun summer read, with a Catholic backdrop, you could do far worse. For my own part, I think I'll be looking up a few of Read's other novels.

On Meeting Bloggers

As MrsD mentioned, we had the pleasure of dropping in to hobnob with several of our fellow wizards in the blogging world during the recent Darwin family travels. At various points in the Great Ohio Trip we spent time with:

Entropy
Fr. Fox
Jay Anderson
TS
Betty Duffy
Rich Leonardi
Scott Carson

And on previous occasions we've had the pleasure of meeting:

Tito
Blackadder
Jenn
JulieD
The Opinionated Homeschooler
LitChic
The Bettinellis
Cranky Conservative (and the missus)

(My apologies to whoever I have forgotten. It wasn't intentional!)

Even in our increasingly wired culture, there's still a slightly spooky air to the statement, "I'm getting together with someone I met online." Not only does it make it sound like one of you has a greater than average chance of being a serial killer, it has a certain antisocial ring to it, suggesting that one spends most of one's time in a basement, smelling of old socks and lit only by the glow of the monitor. I must admit, I'm rather cautious to admit to non-blogsphere people that I originally met some of my friends and coworkers through blogging. "We knew each other in Catholic circles" tends to be my way of explaining it away.

Yet for all that I am hesitant to admit to seeking out chances to meet those we interact with online, I've found it to be a universally positive experience. Admittedly, the etiquette of meeting for the first time someone one has talked to for years can be a little awkward at first. But modern social relations are nothing if not challenging from a social custom point of view. (How as poor MrsD to navigate the traditional "nice girls don't kiss on the first date" stricture when we were both car-less freshman on the same college campus? Our first "date" was a number of months after we started "going out". But I digress.)

For me, the reason why meeting bloggers is so enjoyable is because one has already been able to find out a great deal about the other person through a less socially threatening medium. I am, by habit, a very cautious conversationalist. For all my online opinionating, I'm very hesitant to bring up politics or religion or indeed my more unusually interests in history, literature and languages with people I don't already have some indication would be interested and congenial. Indeed, I usually stick to discussing with people mostly those things in which they have already stated an interest. This leads to safe and low conflict conversations, but with other people who are equally careful in their discussion habits, it can result in never getting too far into any topic.

However, reading what someone else has written over the course of months or years (and reading their comments on my own writing) provides enough of a layer of familiarity that it seems possible to discuss a wide range of topics without too much fear of either alienating (or boring) the other person, or needlessly exposing myself to disapprobation. In effect, the blogsphere acts as a social sifting mechanism. It allows us to form sub-communities of people with at least a certain level of common interest and acceptance. And this commonality makes much more interesting conversation possible. And it also gives one enough information about the specific person to know of possible shared interests, or areas where one ought not to throw one's elbows around. (So for instance, I know not to issue any smack talk against rap when visiting with Jenn and certainly not to bring along a pet scorpion, lest she feel the necessity of instigating a throw down.)

For all that blogging is often knocked as one of the lower forms of communication, in my more self congratulatory moments, I like to imagine the blogsphere as a sort of modern equivalent to the 18th century coffee house culture. Not only did different coffee houses in the great cities like London and Paris and Vienna have different characters (in some people congregated to discuss business, in others philosophy and politics, in other literature, in others science) but there was a thriving genre of one to two sheet daily papers put out by individual writers or writing teams which were distributed to the coffee houses and served as both reading material and conversation topics. Addison & Steele's The Spectator was one of the early successes in this genre, and Samuel Johnson's The Rambler was a late one, but there were many others -- less successful and less remembered. At one point Boswell writes about his wonder at seeing Johnson dash off an issue of The Rambler in one sitting, longhand, and send it off to the printer without revisions. If only my own unrevised (or even revised) writing could be of such value.

Orphan Openings: Cooking Edition

[It's time for a new feature on DarwinCatholic, and since we're much better at starting things than finishing them, the task of writing openings for fiction that we have no intention of completing seems an obvious one for us. We can promise many more, but for the quality improving, I cannot speak.]

Working in the hot kitchen often made Gertrude cross, and so it was with her stores of patience already depleted that she discovered that her husband, so often obstinate in life, refused to fit into the cauldron unless completely deboned and sectioned.

And now for something completely different...

The Nietzsche Family Circus:

Believe me! The secret of reaping the

greatest fruitfulness and the greatest
enjoyment from life is to live dangerously!

Still alive, kinda

Sometime this week we will resume posting in a semi-regular fashion. Today, however, we are still recovering from our 23 hour roadtrip on Saturday. Family togetherness, y'all!

Our thanks go out to all the wonderful bloggers we were privileged to visit during our trip:

Entropy
Fr. Fox
Jay Anderson
TS
Betty Duffy
Rich Leonardi
Scott Carson

Conservative Catholicism and Liberal Islam

I just finished reading Thomas F. Madden's Empires of Trust: How Rome Built--and America Is Building--a New World, and I'm planning to write a couple posts shortly reviewing the book and the ideas it presents. As a prelude of sorts, however, I'd like to revisit some thinking I did a while back:


A month or so ago I finally had the chance to read Steven Vincent's account of life outside the green zone in post-war Iraq: In The Red Zone. It's a very fair book, and worth a read whether you support the war in Iraq or not. The author, since then killed in Iraq by militants, was a New York art reporter who watched the attacks on 9-11 and supported the Iraq war. Having supported the war, he felt like he should go over and see what was really happening over there. The book has the advantage of being writing from a culture writer's point of view rather than a political writer's. And although Vincent starts out as an enthusiastic supporter of the project, he ends unsure whether it's possible for democracy to flourish in Iraq. (I'd be curious to read later work by him and see what he thought of the elections and the provisional constitution, both of which post date his book.)

This reminded me of my long held intention to read more about Islam, so I pull off the shelf the copy of Living Islam (now apparently out of print) by Ahbar S Ahmed which I'd bought on remainder some nine years ago and had been meaning to read ever since. Living Islam is half cultural history, half apologia (think a very, very light weight version of Letters To A Young Catholic with lots of pictures and basic intro information.)

Happy birthday to the best sister ever (except for my other sister)

In honor of my sister Elizabeth's birthday, here's the gist of the mostly-impromptu toast I offered at her wedding along with my younger sister Anna (we divvied up duties as the matron and maid of honor):

As I look around at everyone having a great time at the reception, I'm so impressed at how Elizabeth organized this whole wedding. All the organizational skills in our family, those genes bypassed me and went straight to Elizabeth, and there was nothing left over for Anna.

As I watched Elizabeth tonight on the altar, praying during her wedding ceremony, it struck me for the first time: she's not just my little sister anymore. She's a mature, gentle, gracious woman, fully capable of planning out almost every detail of this beautiful wedding, and she'll be a wonderful, loving wife to Eric. And a wonderful mother to my future nieces and nephews, of whom I expect plenty.

Having a Great Time, Wish You Were Here

MrsDarwin here, just now surfacing to say that the wedding was the most beautiful I've ever attended, bar none. The day was a superlative. Even nature cooperated -- there was 70% chance of showers, but instead the day was overcast and the light diffused, making for some marvelous pictures in the park. My sister was the most radiant, lovely bride, and the wedding mass itself went without a hitch. Many thanks go to the celebrant, Fr. Schnippel, who recognized us as The Darwins even though we were in our street clothes.

And the reception was about the most kickin' event ever. Good food, good company, old friends, and several special live performances made this the best reception in the history of receptions. The bar has been set high for any other wedding I attend from now on, because I'll be thinking, "How does this compare to the Egan/Wolf wedding of '09?"

As the groomsmen were all standing around the parking lot of the reception hall, waiting for the ladies to arrive for pictures, they were talking about needing an omen for the day. At that point, one of them looks up and says, "Look, a hawk with a snake!" Sure enough, there was a hawk circling above them with a snake in its beak. Anyone want to read the entrails and interpret for us?

Capitalism, A Beneficial Exchange

Blogger Sam Rocha wrote a post the other day titled, "A Brief Defense of 'Capitalism'". However, Rocha's attempt is, I think, somewhat hampered by the fact that he by his own description does not think much of capitalism.

For the most part we (by “we” I mean those of us on the left, yes I will own up to being something of a leftist, whatever that means) like to say that all capitalism, and its governing libertarian sentiment, desires is for there to be no limit at how much one can take for one’s self. It is a creed of the indulgent and the rich. Greed, selfishness, isolationism, sterile individualism and other nasty things, are what we enjoy making capitalism out to be.

With such an opener, what might wonder what it is that Rocha then finds to praise in capitalism. What he find is, I think, not at all unique to capitalism narrowly defined, but it is something which those of us in the West are much attached to:

If we can cut-out the name calling, I think we can find a powerful meaning within capitalist sentiment. Namely, the much-abused, taboo, and rejected idea of the individual, the person-singular. I think that if we take notions of private property and negative freedom (”freedom from”) inherent in capitalist sentiment, and ponder what they mean, we will find that we all value such things privately....

Here is my defense: Capitalism, as it is believed in benevolently, reminds us of our radical existence as images of God with a potency to as we wish within the vast sea of possibility. What we need next is the ability to control ourselves with the prudence, grace, and love of our Creator in this stormy sea of freedom. But we should never be too quick to accept external-control over our bodies, minds, and hearts. We need to be free. And perfect freedom is not the raw, brute force of libertarianism, to be sure. At the same time, it also is that imposing force.

I don't find what Rocha finds to praise unappealing, but at the same time I think that there is something more to be found in capitalism as described by Adam Smith and others which even many of those who frequently condemn capitalism would find it in themselves to admire if they could look past their preconceptions and see Smith-ian capitalism for what it is.

The following is based on my efforts over the last few week to keep up with the folks over at the EconTalk book club as they work through Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (a book he wrote before On the Wealth of Nations but continued to revise until his death). I've not finished the book yet, nor indeed have I been able to make it through as fast as the podcasters have been doing so, but it's been an enjoyable experience and I may well be writing more about the book once I'm done.

First, I think it's important to understand that Smith in both his famous works is engaged in what he considers a descriptive rather than a prescriptive exercise. He does offer judgments and advice at times, but he is not attempting to set forth an order which, if followed, would result in a utopia (which is the Marxist project) but rather to describe how things work. In this sense, one probably does well to think of Smith in the context of a society shaped by English common law attitudes, where intricate order emerges from thousands of small decisions over hundreds of years rather than being planned at a single sitting.

Next, let us take a moment on Smith's concepts of morality, on which the Theory of Moral Sentiments is focused. Smith seems to draw moral notions from two primary sources. First is a sort of empathy. We feel for other people's predicaments by imagining them to be our own, and as such we feel the urge to help them. Second is a notion of status or approval. We want to be seen to treat others well, and so we are always conscious of how our actions towards others would appear to an impartial observer, and try to act in ways that such an impartial observer would approve of. However, these are modified by another human factor, which is that the difficulties of others are necessarily less immediate to us than our own. We know this, and try to make up for it with empathy, but for instance: When we visit a family who has recent lost a loved one, we do so in the knowledge that no matter how much empathy we may feel we do not experience their grief as acutely as they do. Further, the acuteness with which we are able to sympathize with others' sufferings is related to how close they are to us in kinship and/or location. So we will naturally feel the death of a neighbor's child more acutely than we will the report that someone in China just experience the same tragedy.

Now note: These are moral observations rather than moral precepts. There's much more of psychology than of theology or philosophy here.

Let us now turn to capitalism. I would put it forward that the essence of capitalism is not "for there to be no limit at how much one can take for one’s self" nor indeed "the individual, the person-singular", though the latter is implied by capitalism and the former is sometimes allowed by it. Rather, I would say that the essence of capitalism is roughly this: That which you possess or produce is yours until you agree to give it to another in return for some mutually agreed upon good or service.

Why should people who are communitarian in outlook appreciate this?

Smith observes that our own troubles are naturally more immediate to us than those of others. As such, the baker will naturally be more conscious of his own family's need for food and his own desire to spend leisure time with his family than he will be of the hunger of the blacksmith's family. And the blacksmith will naturally be more conscious of his own needs for iron implements and for time with his family than he will be of the baker's need for iron implements.

Because of this, both men will be better served to rely upon the other's self interest than the other's beneficence. If the blacksmith gives the baker a new griddle in return for a week's bread, or if he pays the baker coin which the baker can then use to purchase clothes from the tailor or grain from the miller, he joins the baker's well being to his own well being.

Does this mean that capitalism suggests that everyone simply be greedy? Not necessarily. Greed is a passion for consumption, which seeks to take all things into oneself. What this principle of exchange is really based upon is relationship: If I want to get something from someone else, I may only do so by giving him something which is of equal or greater value to him. I must form a relationship (however tenuous) with him and give him something which he values in order to get from him what I value. Capitalism is thus at root a system which requires a certain degree of relationship and solidarity, as I cannot get anything without providing to others what they in turn need.

Now here is where I may lose my more left-leaning readers: I would put it that the advantage of capitalism (understood as the principle that we own what we have or produce and that in order to get me to part with those things which I own, you ought to propose a mutually beneficial exchange) is that it is the only means of moving goods around through society which does not rely on the threat of force. People often like to talk about the "inherent violence of capitalism" (I suppose because they picture the central image of capitalism being Mr. Moneybags forcing thousands of impoverished workers into a factory) but while capitalism theoretically rests upon mutually beneficial exchange, socialist/communitarian systems do in fact rest upon the implicit threat of violence. How so? Well, in our earlier illustration, if the blacksmith and the baker live in a socialist society, the reason for the baker to give bread to the blacksmith is the implicit threat of the political entity's monopoly on legal violence: If he doesn't give bread to everyone in the village someone will come and take it from him, or he will be punished for not doing his job.

Now, any reasonable polity must use its implicit threat of violence to exact a certain amount from people, in order to run the state and provide basic services to those who need them. But one reason why we ought to prefer that as much of the movement of goods and services within society be capitalistic rather than communitarian is that the former is based upon mutually beneficial exchange, while the latter on the implicit threat of violence. I would suggest that we ought to prefer that as much of the exchange in our society as possible be mutually beneficial rather than forced.


A brief concluding digression: I'm sure that someone will point out that in reality there is often so much inequality between the richest in a society and the poorest that it is impossible for them to be on an even footing to make mutually beneficial exchanges. Thus, with extreme inequality, people may be "forced" to work for wages which are not in fact adequate to sustain them. I would agree that extremes of inequality do allow capitalism to become much less beneficial for the have-nots. And to mitigate extreme injustices, the state doubtless sometimes has to use its implicit threat of force to protect the vulnerable. However, beyond assuring basic human needs are met, I would tend to support finding ways for the have-nots to be more productive in relation to the haves (and thus giving them more leverage when negotiating exchange) rather than a more radical leveling approach to bringing the haves down. I would imagine that nearly everyone supports both these methods to some extent, but the difference between left in right has a great deal to do with where one sees the proper balance between them.

No Mercy for Swine (flu)

I suppose one should take these things seriously, but given the way the media has spun itself up about the slightest chance of a good pandemic (bird flu, SARS, and now swine flu) one can't help but great the whole thing with a little levity. Of course, I suppose the Sicilians thought it was pretty droll when a few Genoese ships ran aground full of rats and dead sailors back in 1347.

Still I find it charming that the excitement of a new disease has immediately got people arguing about the right name for it:

Some authorities object to calling the flu outbreak "swine flu". U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack expressed concerns that this would lead to the misconception that pork is unsafe for consumption. Israeli deputy health minister Yakov Litzman proposed the name "Mexican flu" because Muslims and Jews consider pork to be unclean, but the Israeli government retracted this proposal after Mexican complaints. The World Organization for Animal Health has proposed the name "North American influenza", while the European Commission uses "novel flu virus". Medical terminology refers to the virus as "Influenza A (H1N1) virus, human". "Flying pig flu" has been suggested as a more accurate description of the virus' genetic makeup, since it has elements of bird, swine, and human flus.

I'm all for "flying pig flu". That would allow me to say, "There'll be pork in the tree tops by lunch time," in my aging Katherine Hepburn voice.

On Picking a College

I've got a lengthy post up at American Catholic on the choice between Catholic and secular colleges.

No Guarantees

I was struck by this Megan McArdle post, of which I will go ahead a quote a large chunk:

Guess what, honey? You're not entitled. You can do everything right, and the universe doesn't owe you anything. Neither do your fellow taxpayers. If there is any way to save the banking system without paying you $2 million a year, I will do it, not because I hate you and want to rob you, but because I don't want to pay more than I have to. You may have come across this concept in business school. At Chicago, we called it "a market".

The real problem with investment bankers goes deeper, and is the problem of the entire upper middle class: we have come to believe that complying with the rules produces excellent results as by some natural law. In school, if you do your work, teacher gives you an A. It comes to seem like a sort of a natural law: if you have a good education and work hard, the universe is supposed to reward you. After school, the upper middle class gravitates towards careers with very well defined advancement hierarchies: medicine, law, finance, consulting, where this subtle belief is constantly reinforced.

True, a lot of people fall by the wayside in the up-or-out structures of most of the top firms. But that was always true--the whole idea that you deserve to be rewarded for your hard work always involved ignoring the entirely undeserved natural endowment of intelligence and social capital that most upper-middle-class kids are given by their parents. The people who stay in the system and make it to the upper levels do not see it as mostly the product of luck; they view it as the just reward for all their hard work and sacrifices.

I include myself in this group. When I was laid off for a long time in 2002, I felt as betrayed by the universe as if the law of gravity had suddenly ceased to operate. I had worked hard, gone to an excellent business school, and I was supposed to have a job, just as an apple thrown into the air falls back to earth. I was angry, but also deeply shaken, by the notion that I could work hard, do everything right, and still end up unemployed.

We're watching the entire investment banking industry go through what I endured seven years ago. They aren't going to be paid so well in the future, even though they made the colossal mistake of giving up the best years of their lives to the finance industry. It feels--and it is--massively, nearly unfathomably unfair. On the other hand, that's a pretty good description of the universe: massive. nearly unfathomable. unfair.

Just ask any manager at Chrysler with two swell kids and a nice house in a Detroit suburb.

Anyone who has a halfway decent job is incredibly lucky--and yes, journalists and academics, complaining that it isn't fair you don't get paid much, that includes you. If your IQ had been forty points lower, or Mom had been on drugs, or you'd been born in Africa, you'd be spending your days doing hard, disgusting manual labor. The difference in utility between your salary and an investment banker's is trivial compared to the difference in utility between your salary and a Bangladeshi farmer's.

So for all the bankers annoy me, their pay--and its difference from mine--doesn't outrage me. The difference between their pay and that of a physical therapy assistant or an auto line worker doesn't outrage me. No one deserves their pay, so I can hardly be angry at the folks on Wall Street for taking what they could get. And so I wonder why so much of the commentary on Wall Street--not on the pay caps, but just on Wall Street in general--focuses on how much they were paid. Would it have been better if they had only been paid a third, or a tenth, or a twentieth as much? Would that make the recession significantly more enjoyable for the rest of us?

They made colossal mistakes, to be sure. But if you thought that high compensation was supposed to guarantee no errors, I have the same response to you that I have to the bankers: the universe does not owe you anything in the way of guarantees.

This fits with one of my pet intellectual hobby horses: that in modern society we have lost touch with the reality that life is often beyond our control. That one works hard does not necessarily mean that one's labor will bear fruit. That one is a good person does not mean that bad things won't happen to you.

Through most of human history, this reality was constantly impressed upon us by the fact that most people lived by subsistence farming, which meant they were constantly at the mercy of the weather, pests, diseases, etc.

In Victor David Hanson's lyric Fields Without Dreams about the vineyard in Calibornia's central valley which his family has owned for four generations, there's a scene in which he talks about how farmers confront nature's caprice. Hanson and his neighbors all grow grapes for raisins. To make raisins, the grapes are picked and laid out on drying trays to dry in the hot California sun. If it rains while your grapes are still out on trays, you lose the whole crop to a sodden, fermenting mess. If you pull your grapes in from drying too soon, they get lower raisins that sell for less. So each fall the growers are all watching the weather reports, looking at the skies, and judging when to pull their raisins in. One year Hanson and his brother rush to bring all the raisins in at the chance of a storm. Their old-timer neighbor leaves his out, convinced it won't actually rain. It does. And Hanson sees the old farmer the next day, looking over the ruin of his entire harvest and contemplating whether he'll take out one more loan to try to keep the farm or just sell out. "I just didn't think it would rain," the old man says.

Today, very few people in our country have to battle nature's capriciousness for their daily bread.

Unreasonable Compensation

With people focused on the economic downturn, many have found it a good time to give a little extra thought to whether other people are making more than they ought to. The president has spoken out several times against "excessive compensation" of executives, and a number of people have floated the idea of adjusting the top marginal income tax rate to effectively cap total compensation at ten million dollars a year. MZ tackled the question somewhat humorously here.

Beyond question, $10 million is a lot of money. Most of us will never see anything like that much money, and so it seems entirely reasonable to demand: Why should anyone be paid so much? What's so special about CEOs and actors and baseball players that they deserve tens of millions of dollars? Aren't they running off with the money that we should be getting instead?

I certainly wouldn't claim that executives are not often paid more than they are worth. A board of directors is still a group of people with emotional commitments (including wanting to assure themselves that they made the right pick in choosing the current CEO) and they will certainly not always do what is in their own best interest. Though we may be comforted that in a free economy the incentives are in place to automatically punish them for not doing so.

To look at an example of the impact of high executive compensation, I consulted the handy Executive PayWatch Database which my friends at the AFL/CIO put together for me. I picked Hewlett-Packard Company to look at. CEO Mark Hurd made $34,031,021 in total compensation in 2008. This, the AFL/CIO helpfully calculates for me is the same as 836 years worth of salary for the average worker. Should we be outraged?

You know you want to

Betty has been to a "Healing Mass", and perfectly sums up my own experience with the Charismatic movement.

The team of healers stands up around the altar waiting for the line of faithful to approach them, and they are Betty Homemaker, Sue Teacher, Jack Plumber, Mike Lawyer. As I stand up at the altar with Sue Teacher’s hands on my head, why not entertain, just for a moment, the belief that the Spirit has animated her heart, mind and hands and is permeating into my body, making my thighs and calves feel jittery, causing me to tighten my shoulders and close my eyes. It is filling my body with hot coffee, pouring it in from the toes, up to the top of my head, capping me in warm foam, sending a delightful jitter into all my nerves. I am not just a person who drinks the drink anymore. I am the vessel in which the drink is poured and I contain all the caffeinated, alcoholic stimulants in the world without ever taking a sip. Who would not want to avail themselves of this feeling? Why aren’t all the bored teenagers and lusty old men of the world lining up for this high? Why not roll over towards my husband in bed with me and say, “Hey, feel like getting slain in the Spirit tonight?” If he had felt what I just felt, he would not say no.

I want the Charismatic experience to be authentic. I long for some psychic subrealm that allows unselfconscious and physical communication between God and me. And if this communication can be won with third party intervention, this intermediary laying-on-of-hands, rather than by my own concentration and spiritual discipline, all the better.

Yet, I remain a skeptic. I held my ground. I did not fall down. Is the warmth of someone’s hands on my head enough to give me chills? Is the intimacy of this little woman whispering in my ear, “Come back to me, My Child,” enough to bring tears to my eyes?

My family was involved in a Charismatic community when I was a teenager, and so I attended myriad healing masses and conferences and Life in the Spirit retreats. I found that I was unable to shut down my internal editor enough to stop analyzing my every little response. Was this the Spirit? Was that the Spirit? How do I differentiate between the Spirit and goosebumps or the warmth of comforting hand on my back? And what relief to finally stop resisting the earnest prayers and defying the waiting arms and the entreaties to just be more open, and drop into the eager solid arms. People who rail against peer pressure in schools have never been prayed over at a Charismatic meeting.

Rerun Time: Keeping House

It's a busy week, so it's rerun time. Here's from April 2006.

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article today about marketing cleaning supplies in Italy. (I'd link to it, but you have to subscribe to their online edition to access it.) Here are some stats:

* Italian women spend an average of 21 hours a week on household chores (other than cooking). American woman, by comparison, spend only a fifth that much time cleaning.
* Italian women wash kitchen and bathroom floors at least four times a week. American women wash them once a week. (I'm way behind by either standard.)
* Italian women iron nearly all their wash, even down to socks and underwear. Sheesh!
* 80% of Italians iron all their laundry
* 31% have dishwashers
* 1% have dryers

Perhaps if you don't have a dryer you have less clothing to take care of, so then you have more time to do all that ironing? I wonder if the sport of extreme ironing has taken off there in Italy.

Now, my house isn't filthy, but I really don't put in that much time cleaning -- I don't enjoy it much, to tell the truth. I guess that all told, I hit the four-hour average for American women, but I never think to dust, vacuuming is sporadic (especially upstairs because I have to lug my heavy vacuum up when I want to clean), and the kitchen floor is mopped infrequently. The laundry gets done (with the benefit of a dryer, I might add) but even if it gets folded it's not always put away. Some of this is due to my disinclination for the tasks, but a lot of it also has to do with the fact that whenever I dedicate myself to some job, I invariably hear crashes or squeals and find a disaster in progress.

My kids are climbers -- I find myself saying, "Get down! Get down!" so often I sound like a scratched disco record. But maybe climbing is the way the high shelves are going to get dusted, at least for now.

The other piece of note in the Journal is a review of a book called "To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing our Inner Housewife". It's written by Caitlin Flanagan, a woman who stays at home -- not exactly stays at home with her kids, because she has a nanny, a maid, and a gardener -- and writes for the Atlantic Monthly and the New Yorker about the Mommy Wars and the aftermath of feminism. The review assures us that she is indeed a charming, talented writer. Good for her. Less good is her own mothering style, which involves calling the nanny when things get sticky:

"Paloma, Patrick is throwing up!" I would tell her, and she would literally run to his room, clean the sheets, change his pajamas, spread a clean towel on his pillow feed him ice chips, sing to him. I would stand in the doorway, concerned, making funny faces at Patrick to cheer him up -- the way my father did when I was sick and my mother was taking care of me.

Well, all right. I may only clean my house four hours a week, but when anyone in my house is sick, I'm there. And I don't think that a working mother who, after putting in a full day's work, picking up the kids, getting dinner, and packing everyone off to bed, has just put up her aching feet and sat down with Ms. Flanagan's book would feel at all charmed by an elegant turn of phrase here or a witty epigram there from a woman who won't even take care of her sick child in the middle of the night. I don't have to learn to love my inner housewife because being a housewife is simply what I do -- it's my full-time job, thank you very much. I may not be the world's most proficient cleaning lady, but when it comes to taking care of my family when they need me, I wrote the book.

Krugman's Foundation

This Newsweek article about Nobel Prize-winning economist and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman contained an interesting biographical detail:

Krugman says he found himself in the science fiction of Isaac Asimov, especially the "Foundation" series—"It was nerds saving civilization, quants who had a theory of society, people writing equations on a blackboard, saying, 'See, unless you follow this formula, the empire will fail and be followed by a thousand years of barbarism'."

His Yale was "not George Bush's Yale," he says—no boola-boola, no frats or secret societies, rather "drinking coffee in the Economics Department lounge." Social science, he says, offered the promise of what he dreamed of in science fiction—"the beauty of pushing a button to solve problems. Sometimes there really are simple solutions: you really can have a grand idea."

This struck me because I read Asimov's original three foundation novels several times when I was in high school, yet the one thing that always really bothered me about the books was the idea that Hari Seldon and his psychohistorians could calculate out with precision everything that would happen for centuries. And even granted this determinist vision, it bothered me even more that the one great unpredictable factor was the character named The Mule, whom Seldon's equations could not predict the actions of because the Mule was a mutant and thus inherently a creature of randomness rather than predictability. The absurd premise and the absurd exception to it gnawed at me, though the great virtue of the books is that they are among the small number of science fiction books with the sort of grant historical sweep which a devotee of history cannot help but enjoy.

It's interesting to me that it was precisely the element of Foundation which I always disliked which attracted Krugman. And perhaps allows me to claim that my political aversion to the idea of the centralized technocratic view of politics is a philosophy that runs fairly deep.

Packing List

First off, I want to know: who are these five people in the poll who only read my posts? I guess I'm flattered... Thanks for the vote of confidence? I have a feeling that if we'd put in an option stating, "I only read Darwin's posts" that he would have gotten a lot more than five votes. It's on now.

But seriously folks -- there is packing going on. We leave at 4 AM Saturday for an 18 hour drive to Ohio (straight through -- why not, ha ha?) so I have to Be Ready. I've already starting packing the kids' stuff, so if you see my children wandering around in ratty rags it's because all their other clothes are in a suitcase, and by gum, they'd better stay in that suitcase until Saturday.

I'd remembered that my friend Mrs. Big Tex had a packing checklist for vacations, and she's given me permission to post it. I'm using it to help keep all my ducks in a row. If you guys have other useful additions, or any tips for major family packing (as in, we need to pack for two weeks), please share and do your part to help us Get Out the Door at Four.

Packing List

Clothes:
Shirts
Pants
Skirts, dresses, slip
Socks
Shoes: sandals, tennis, dress, boots
Underlovelies
Belt
PJ’s
Swimsuit and coverup/t-shirt
Jacket

HBA (Health and Beauty Aids)
Shampoo/Conditioner
Soap/Body Wash
Sponge/washclothes
Face wash
Shaver
Toothbrush and paste
Makeup
Lotion
Deodorant
Brush/comb
Hairbands and barrettes
Jewelry
Pads
First Aid Kit
Bandaids
Sunscreen

Misc.:
Cell phones and chargers
Snacks
Camera and charger
Laptop and all cords
Maps
Alarm clock (use cell phone)
Vitamins/Medications
Chart and Thermometer (NFP)
Kleenex
Sunglasses
Hat
Sand toys
Sleeping bag
Water bottle (if flying do not fill till through security)
Gifts (Wedding birthday etc… if attending event on trip)
Plane tickets/itinerary
Contact info for people visiting


Baby Packing List:
Oensies
Pants
Shorts
Skirts
Dresses
Socks
Shoes: sandals, tennis, dress, boots
PJ’s
Swimsuit, diaper and towel
Jacket
Hat
Winter – gloves, hats, scarves, snowsuits
Diapers
Diaper cream
Nose plunger
Wipes
Wash clothes
Lotion
Toys and books
Church books
Burp rags
Blankets, special pillow
Changing pad
Baby monitor
Toothbrush and paste
Bibs
Burp rags
Sippy cup
Spoons
Baby friendly food
Hand sanitizer
Baby Carrier: Sling/Ergo/Moby D
Stroller
Medicines – Tylenol, teething tablets
Vitamins
Flying/crossing the border – Copy of Birth Certificates


Things to do before leaving the house:

Do early
Tidy up outside, lock shed
Put all important things in the safe
Put a hold on mail
Line up a place for any pets
Pay the bills ahead or take them with you
Plan for friend or neighbor to watch house, make sure they have a key and contact info for you.
Light on a timer for appearance someone is home

Do the day you leave
Turn down (or up for you southerners!) thermostat to 55 degrees
Take out the trash
Wash dirty laundry
Rinse dishes or run dishwasher
Turn off ice machine on fridge
Park off road (for those of us who usually park on the road and could get towed if we leave the car there for more than a couple days)
Turn off Electricity to water heater
Check to make sure freezer and fridge are closed securely

Seven Quick Takes

Thanks to our hostess-with-the-mostest, Jen.

1.So here's something that will simultaneously denote me as someone who is "out of touch", and will cause a large number of people to skip to the next post: I saw, for the first time, an episode of "Hannah Montana". The premise of this entertainment is that a pop star can hide her identity and just blend in as a normal high school kid in Los Angeles! And that she can keep anyone from finding out that she's a pop star by wearing a wig! (The style of these Disney shows is so broad that it strikes me they could make a lot of money by sending out the scripts to high school drama departments and having them performed weekly nationwide. Why not have a nation of Hannah Montanas and collect mondo royalties at the same time?)

I have a bulletin for these folks. The average kid at La Canada/Flintridge High finds nothing unusual in moonlighting as a pop star, because they're all trying to break into the biz as well. I directed a Christmas pageant once for a private school in Pasadena, and amongst my (junior high) students was a actress/voiceover artist, and a ballerina who was out of school for several days because she was performing in The Nutcracker. No one thought it was weird, or treated these girls differently. Hello, it's Los Angeles! People move out there to make careers in entertainment!

I could go on, because the plot holes in Hannah Montana were of sufficient diameter to encompass Boston's Big Dig, but maybe that just proves that I don't "get it".

2. In regards to household-y stuff, I have two major pet peeves: people spilling glasses of liquid, and people tracking through a pile I'm trying to sweep up. Last week someone knocked over water into my pile of debris. I had to bite my tongue, and hard.

3. O frabjous day: it looks like (in addition to traveling for my sister's wedding and needing to refinance the house), we need to get our roof replaced. Always something, isn't it?

4. Speaking of Wedding, my sister is getting Married two weeks from today. Look for our travelogue from the Great Ohio Sojourn of Ought-Nine, coming soon to this space.

5. I'm sorry, you guys -- I have nothing more for you. It's a beautifully gray rainy day here, and it makes me want to crawl back in bed and snuggle under my duvet. So, a picture:

This is typical of the randomness that shows up on the camera when the girls get a hold of it, and it's a decent picture of The Floor. Respect the floor.